


In Death's Garden

by Elizabeth Culmer (edenfalling)



Category: Fairy Tales & Related Fandoms, Nattergalen | The Nightingale - Hans Christian Andersen
Genre: Gen, Remix
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-02
Updated: 2019-09-02
Packaged: 2020-10-05 09:54:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,693
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20486969
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/edenfalling/pseuds/Elizabeth%20Culmer
Summary: Death's garden is not a place one can normally reach by looking for it, though all find their way there in the end. However, sometimes when one begins to travel with no clear destination, one finds oneself in strange places. So it was with the nightingale when she slipped from the Emperor's palace in the confusion of her mechanical copy's first performance.





	In Death's Garden

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/gifts).
  * Inspired by [The Nightingale At Dawn](https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633946) by [Quillori](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Quillori/pseuds/Quillori). 

> So far as I can tell, Danish has two grammatical genders: common and neutral. Nightingale is a common noun, and Andersen sticks with that in his pronoun choices. The Hersholt translation makes the nightingale male, while others I've found online make the bird female instead. Probably "it" would be the most faithful to Andersen's original, but I've gone with "she" for personal reasons.

Death's garden is not a place one can normally reach by looking for it, though all find their way there in the end. However, sometimes when one begins to travel with no clear destination, one finds oneself in strange places.

So it was with the nightingale when she slipped from the Emperor's palace in the confusion of her mechanical copy's first performance. She loved the Emperor, for what singer could possibly fail to love a heart so open to her work? But she did not love the silk ties and cage bars he had used to keep her close. All birds are born to fly, and so she flew, wings spread wide and heart filled with love of the sky and freedom.

She flew all day and all night, reacquainting herself with the sun and the stars, dancing with the winds, and at sunset she sang a brief duet with a passing skylark. At last dawn crept pale and bright across the sky, and the nightingale thought to alight once more in the cool green boughs of her forest and rebuild her tattered nest.

But to her surprise, she found the trees beneath her wings had become strangers and she could no longer hear the soft roar of the sea in the distance or the lowing of cattle in their fields.

In fact, she could hear nothing at all, save for the slow, patternless fall of dew to the damp earth beneath dark trees.

"How peculiar," the nightingale said to herself, for all the places she had known were full of rustling, noisy life. This silence was a mystery. In her youth she might simply have shrugged her wings and moved on, but since her journey to the Emperor's palace she had become curious about the wider world, and so she began to fly toward the heart of the silent trees.

Soon she saw a high stone wall and flitted down to perch on its edge.

The wall stretched along the base of a high, green hill, its slope split by a dozen narrow stairways. Roses and elders wound their way between the stairs, their pale, lovely blossoms running riot over low mounds of stone. White tendrils of fog flowed down from the heights to gather in thick pools at the foot of the hill.

There was no gate in the wall.

"Hello! Your garden is very beautiful," the nightingale said, but no voice rose from the fog or the flowers to answer.

"Perhaps whoever tends this garden is sleeping," she said to herself. "Not everyone rises with the dawn. I shall sing to wake them and then try again."

She drew a breath and began to sing. It was not her best performance -- when one has brought tears to an Emperor's eyes, singing to an empty garden, however lovely, may seem a somewhat lesser occasion -- but neither was it her worst, for a true artist puts some of their heart and soul into all their works. Her song twined through the dark leaves, the white flowers, the pale fog, and echoed back from the stone walls and steps until it seemed as though the land itself were singing: a high, thin, ghostly tune, full of sorrow and regret though the nightingale herself had sung joy and friendship.

"Hello?" she called again when she had finished her song.

Only the echoes answered, and soon even they had faded.

A warier soul might have flown away, but the nightingale was a trusting bird and was curious about this garden, so different in its stillness and silence from the carefully tended marvels of the Emperor's garden that merged into her own woods by the sea. She threw herself once more into the air.

As she crossed into the garden, her little heart skipped a beat and she faltered in her flight. Ahead, at the top of the hill, a massive yew tree raised its twisting branches and she sank to perch on a twig above the ever-present mist. The yew berries were very bright and red -- more brilliant even than the Emperor's jewels and silks -- and for a moment the nightingale thought they were drops of blood gathered to fall. But she blinked, and they were only berries again.

She ate a handful for her breakfast while she continued to look around.

It truly was a beautiful garden. Even the lack of care that had let the roses and elders grow rampant over what had once been neat, tidy paths felt intentional, as if the gardener wished to show that though all things fell to ruin in the end, there was yet grace in ruin. The stark light of dawn against the dark leaves and pale flowers cast the scene in contrast like a painting of ink on silk, with the red yew berries as the only splash of color. The Emperor himself would have nodded in approval, though the nightingale thought, with a touch of satisfaction, that he would not have wept.

She moved to a branch deeper within the yew's embrace, safe from passing hawks, and slept.

When she woke, dawn's pale, brilliant light still slanted through the needles and the garden was silent as the grave.

The nightingale lifted her wings in surprise. "Did I sleep a whole day and night?" she asked herself. "Surely not!" And yet, the sun had not risen an inch since she had crossed the wall into the garden.

Uneasy, she ate another berry from the yew. Then she flew down the steep, overgrown slope to perch on a sprig of elder. A spray of roses bobbed nearby and stretched its thorns toward her. The roses were huge and heavy in contrast to the tiny starbursts of elder, and their scent hung thick and sweet in the air like incense burned before tablets on a family altar.

The sun continued to stand still in the sky.

The nightingale peered downward through the dark leaves of the elder, toward the low mound of stone beneath the roots. She could make out a small figure of a lion, and then another facing it in guarding posture. A line of characters marched down the facing stone, obscured by wood and thorns, proclaiming a long-forgotten name.

At the foot of the gravestone lay a fragment of human skull.

The nightingale shivered in horror.

"Who are you, abandoned and not honored by your family?" she murmured to the bone. "What is this place where the sun doesn't rise and no one breaks the silence?"

"This is Death's garden," the skull answered, its words appearing in her mind without touching her ears. "This is the fate of all things. Spirits pass on to _yinjiang_ and flesh returns to earth, but the ending itself, the decay and despair, must have their place as well. This is that place, a moment caught out of time."

"Decay and despair forever!" the nightingale exclaimed. "Who can live like that?"

"No one," said the skull in its soundless voice. "That is the point. Come touch the earth and give your flesh to the flowers. Be at peace."

"Someday all who live must die," the nightingale said, "but at their own appointed time and place. This is not mine. The Emperor himself could not hold me, and neither shall Death. Not today."

The thorns stretched toward her flesh and feathers like a fisher's barbed hooks. The elder bent twigs to cage her feet and bowed toward the hungry earth, where the fog and the scent of flowers gathered to steal her breath.

But the nightingale held her ground and sang.

She sang of her joy in flight, the breathless, burning pleasure of wings churning the air and her whole body straining, the bright exertion a reminder with every breath and heartbeat that life is precious and fleeting. She sang of her pride at the Emperor's tears, at knowing her music had touched a great man's heart. She sang of her desire to see the world, now that she had ventured beyond her small horizon. And she sang of her love for her own home forest with its gentle, rustling trees, the crackle of cookfires in peasant houses, the lowing of cattle at dusk, and the fishers pulling their boats up the sand with the evening tide.

The echoes twined back from the wall and the graves, changing her song to a thin melody of sleep and regret and pain.

The nightingale sang on, weaving the deathly tune into her own music: for death is a part of life and cannot be destroyed. But no part is greater than the whole, and despair and decay cannot overpower love and faith. Someday, the nightingale sang, she would return to the garden. But that day was not today, and when she returned she would come in peace and full knowledge of her fate, not tricked and trapped before the true end of her story.

Buoyed by her song, she leapt into the air.

The thick silence of the garden wrapped around her legs and wings like silken threads, and the roses and elders raised branches like bars, but she slipped their bonds as she had slipped from the palace and flew safely over the wall.

And though it had taken her a full day and night to reach the garden, it seemed as if between one breath and the next she saw her own dear home beneath her wings, with the trees a welcoming green, the sea a brilliant blue, and the warm woodsmoke rising from the peasants' chimneys. In the distance, the Emperor's city and palace gleamed under the golden light of the evening sun.

The nightingale looked toward the palace for a long moment. Then she shook her head. "Not today. But someday."

And she flitted down to her tree beside the path, where a little kitchen-maid walked with tired feet and a bucket of scraps for her poor sick mother, singing the clockwork nightingale's song under her breath to lift her spirits and speed her way, though it left her eyes dry and her heart only half-moved.

The nightingale drew a deep breath and began once more to sing.


End file.
